A long time ago, years back, when we were still living in Ann Arbor, I read a book by a guy named Joe Mitchell who on occasion hung out at McSorley’s Old Ale House and wrote for the New Yorker back in the 30’s and 40’s. The book was a collection of his New Yorker pieces called Up In the Old Hotel. I loved it. Loved his writing. I said it was “like eating warm pancakes with lots of butter and syrup and washing it down with good hot strong coffee.” I actually said that. Wrote it, actually.

Well, one of his stories in that book is called “McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon,” and was all about this ancient bar in Manhattan, kind of in the East Village, where broken down old men used to hang out and eat onions and crackers and drink beer all day and warm themselves around an old pot belly stove. It went on and on about how great this place was, because it hadn’t changed since like 1890 (and this was written in the ‘forties) and Mitchell was just happy as hell that a place like this still existed in his  go-go-go world of “modern day” New York, with all it’s fancy skyscrapers and cars and the hub and the bub.

Oh, he described the inch-thick dust on the wishbones hanging above the bar that were there from a Thanksgiving dinner a bunch of kids had there at McSorley’s before they shipped off to Europe for World War One. And he went on about posters of Lincoln (who drank there) and Teddy (who drank there) and pictures of all these local baseball teams and all this other stuff that covered every square inch of the walls, and the gruff bartenders and the sawdust on the floor (of course) and the smell of the place and the back room and this and that and the other thing.

And I was kind of pissed. I was pissed because the place sounded so great, so classic, so mythically historically amazing and New Yorky, and I was sure (since remember Mitchell had written this back in the 1940s) that it would be long gone. Long gone, knocked down in the ’60s by Robert Moses to build some goddam NYU abomination or something. Slum clearance. Gone. Phhht. Sorry, John. No McSorley’s for you. Yeah, boo-hoo. But guess what?

McSorley’s Never Left

Right. The sonofabitch was STILL THERE. And when I went and visited New York in ’99 or whatever, I went to McSorley’s, hung out with some friends, talked to some really good-natured intelligent people that we were sharing a table with, had something like six or eight little beers (you can only order them in twos, since they’re so little) and had just a fine time. Jolly old time. Sitting around, looking at all that stuff that Mitchell had written about — the wishbones, the posters, the stove, all that stuff. And there were even onions and cheese and hot mustard and crackers there for the taking. JUST LIKE MITCHELL SAID. God dang, I was happy. My little inner history geek was just happy as a freakin’ clam.

So that’s why McSorley’s didn’t break my heart. It’s still there. It didn’t go away. Mitchell built it all up in my mind, and I was not disappointed. And this is why it’s going to be print #1 in my Great Good Places of Manhattan series. Because not only is it arguably the oldest bar in NYC (along with the Ear Inn which will also be in the series), but because I love it for still being there, on East 7th Street, right off of Cooper Square. Still there. Go check it out. Preferably on a cold afternoon.

McSorley’s